Poll: Fisher retains lead in Democratic primary for Senate seat

Five weeks before Ohio's May primary, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher continues to hold a single-digit lead in the Democratic matchup for U.S. Senate, a new poll shows.

Five weeks before Ohio's May primary, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher continues to hold a single-digit lead in the Democratic matchup for U.S. Senate, a new poll shows.

But Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner remains very alive in a race in which 40 percent of the voters are undecided and even two-thirds of the "decided" voters say they still may change their mind.

Fisher currently tops Brunner by 33 percent to 26 percent in a new Quinnipiac Poll today, meaning he may have to tap his campaign fund for expensive television ads to cement his victory. Unless Brunner's paltry fund-raising has increased dramatically since her last campaign finance report, she won't have enough money to go on TV in the contest for the seat being vacated by Republican George V. Voinovich, who is retiring after two terms in Washington.

But whatever the winner spends now, he or she won't have for the general election race against Republican former Congressman Rob Portman, who already has far more cash than either of his potential Democratic rivals.

"Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher is ahead as the candidates enter the home stretch, but the lead is not that large and the size of the undecided vote with a relatively short period until primary election day underscores the potential volatility of the contest," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in a statement. "Fisher's lead shouldn't be all that surprising since he has been active in statewide politics for going on two decades and is better known than Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner because she is much newer to the statewide political scene."

Fisher is ahead largely because Democratic voters believe by a two-to-one margin he is the better candidate to take on Portman, Brown said. Ohio voters also are more familiar with Fisher; 9 percent more said they know enough about him to form a favorable/unfavorable opinion.

"With so many voters lacking so much information with so little time to go until the voting, the election is going to be decided by which of the two does a better job reaching this big group of voters who don't think they know enough at this point to make a choice," Brown said. "Given how campaigns work, the candidate with the biggest and best television campaign is most likely to prevail."

The Connecticut university's poll of 978 likely Ohio Democratic primary voters from Thursday through Sunday has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Those surveyed were pulled from registered voter lists based on people who have voted in recent elections.

The full results are at http://www.quinnipiac.edu/images/polling/oh/oh03302010.doc